Adrienne Kennedy: Biography from Answers.com Mobile

Adrienne Kennedy

Kennedy, Adrienne (b. 1931), author, lecturer, and prizewinning playwright. Born Adrienne Lita Hawkins on 13 September 1931 to Cornell Wallace and Etta (Haugabook) Hawkins in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kennedy grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Cleveland public schools. The future playwright entered Ohio State University in 1949, earning a BA in education in 1953. She also studied at Columbia University (1954–1956), the Theatre Wing of the New School for Social Research, Circle in the Square Theatre School, and Edward Albee's Theatre Workshop in New York City. On 15 May 1953 Kennedy married Joseph C. Kennedy and they have two sons, Joseph C. and Adam. The couple divorced in 1966.

Kennedy was a founding member of the Women's Theatre Council in 1971, a member of the board of directors of PEN (1976–1977), and International Theatre Institute representative in Budapest in 1978. Her numerous awards include a Village Voice Obie for Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967, several Rockefeller grants (1967–1969, 1974, 1976), a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1973, a CBS Fellowship at the School of Drama in 1973, a Creative Artists public service grant in 1974, a Yale Fellowship (1974–1975), a Stanley Award, a New England Theatre Conference grant, and an American Book Award in 1990. In July 1995, she was named playwright in residence for the September 1995 through May 1996 season with the Signature Theater Company in New York. Two of her predecessors for this honor, Horton Foote and Edward Albee, have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their respective seasons.

A writer whose work continues to exemplify complexity and independent vision, Kennedy now claims authorship of some thirteen published plays, five unpublished plays, several autobiographical works of nonfiction, a short story, and a novella. Her first published work was the short story “Because of the King of France”, published under the pseudonym Adrienne Cornell in Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature (1963). Her first professionally produced play was Funnyhouse in 1964. A Lesson in Dead Language (published in Collision Course, 1968) was produced along with Funnyhouse in London on 28 April 1968. A Lesson features a classroom setting where the teacher is dressed from the waist up as a white dog. Her pupils (or pupil, depending on the production), all adolescent girls, wear white costumes with red stains signifying sexual maturation; the play deals with the accompanying trauma of the bloody rite of passage. A Rat's Mass, in which humans regress to the status of rats, was named one of the best plays of the season for 1966. Written in 1963, it was first produced in April 1966 by Theatre Company in Boston, and later in Rome (21 June 1966) and Turin (28 October 1966). It is anthologized in New Black Playwrights (1968).

At a time when other African American playwrights were making profound assertions of black pride in their works, and a sort of nationalist movement in African American theater was afoot, Kennedy created African American female protagonists in Funnyhouse and The Owl Answers (first produced at the White Barn Theatre, Westport, Connecticut, in 1965) who were clearly confounded by their multiethnic origins. Before the advent of postmodernist drama, Kennedy's plays featured nonlinear narratives, dramatic and surrealistic imagery, split characters who existed in dreamlike states, fragmented formats, and unconventional plots. Her routine use of poetic and bouyant language, pregnant with multiple levels of meaning, makes Kennedy a deliberate master of the verbal metaphor. She combines elements of expressionism with a verbal fluidity to evoke a series of profound and provocative effects. Critics of Kennedy's work must be attuned to a variety of critical approaches and traditions to accurately assess her value to the theatrical community.

In her autobiographical memoir, People Who Led to My Plays (1987), Kennedy discloses an aspect of her life that may help to explain her independent vision. Her maternal grandfather was a rich white peach farmer with whom Kennedy interacted during visits to her parents' hometown of Montezuma, Georgia. From her Morehouse-educated father, the playwright learned that whites in Montezuma were of mostly British heritage. In the preface to Deadly Triplets: A Theatre Mystery and Journal (1990), Kennedy points out that her work in Funnyhouse and The Owl Answers was as “filled with English imagery–Queen Victoria, Chaucer, William the Conquerer–as it was filled with African images–Patrice Lumumba, savannahs, frangipani trees.” Kennedy's acknowledgment of, and involvement with, combined African and British aspects of her heritage helps to account for multicultural themes in her plays. She admits to a fascination with England's legendary queens; literary influences on her personal and professional development actually include a plethora of works by authors from around the world. Her 1987 memoir tracks some of the people and images that affected her development as an author. For example, an entry under the heading “Tennessee Williams” includes the pronouncement that the summer evening she saw The Glass Menagerie was “when the idea of being a writer and seeing my own family onstage caught fire in my mind”. Under “Wagner” she writes that his music “expressed a wild intensity that I felt growing inside me, but that I could not explain or comprehend”. There are entries entitled “Checkhov, Dante, Virgil and the Bible”, “Langston Hughes,” and “William Faulkner”; and under “James Baldwin,” she writes: “He sharpened my entire vision of America”. Such a personal and professional engagement with the worldwide human community may be a contributing factor to the enduring quality of her work as well as her lengthy tenure as a respected writer and lecturer.

Much of Kennedy's work is taken from real-life experiences. She wrote unpublished autobiographical fiction while studying creative writing at Columbia, and an early autobiographical play, Pale Blue Flowers (1955), was also written there. Deadly Triplets consists of a mystery in novella form and a journal based on Kennedy's experiences in London from 1966 to 1969. She used a sniper incident described in Vietnam War news accounts to write An Evening with Dead Essex, a play first produced at New York's American Place Theatre Workshop (directed by Gaby Rodgers) in 1973. The play was also produced at the Yale Repertory Company in 1974 and published in Theatre (1978). Diary of Lights, produced in 1987 and described as a musical without songs, depicts the youthful idealism of a young black married couple living on the Upper West Side of New York City. Kennedy calls on her early fascination with Hollywood films in A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (Wordplay 3, 1984; Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1989) to examine fractured family relationships while looking at the fantasy lives of movie stars in their films (Bette Davis in “Now, Voyager”, Marlon Brando in “Viva Zapata”, and Montgomery Clift in “A Place in the Sun”). A Movie Star was first produced in New York in 1976 by Public Theatre Workshop; Ntozake Shange directed a production at the University of Houston in 1985. Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1991) is based on Kennedy's own quest for justice following the beating of her son Adam by corrupt police. The Ohio State Murders, first produced in 1992 and included in the Kennedy volume entitled The Alexander Plays (1992), features protagonist Suzanne Alexander reliving and reinventing some troubling incidents from Kennedy's own days as a student at Ohio State. The other three of the Alexander plays are She Talks to Beethoven (first produced in 1989), The Film Club (a monologue), and The Dramatic Circle (a dramatization of The Film Club). She Talks to Beethoven is also published individually in Plays in One Act (1991) and Antaeus (Spring 1991).

A number of Kennedy's plays were commissioned. Herbert Blau and Jules Irving commissioned A Beast's Story for Lincoln Center, though the first production of the play was with The Owl Answers under the title Cities in Belzique (published by Samuel French in 1969). The play underscores the relationship between humans and beasts by highlighting the inhumane tendencies of humankind; it is anthologized in Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum (1974). Controversy surrounded the writing of The Lennon Play: In His Own Write, a project for which Kennedy was hired, but whose authorship she eventually shared with John Lennon and Victor Spinetti. Real and fictionalized accounts of her experiences while writing this play are contained in Deadly Triplets. The play was first produced in 1967 as “Act I Scene 3,” opening as The Lennon Play: In His Own Write on 18 June 1968 at the National Theater, London. It was published in Best Short Plays of the World Theatre in 1968 and 1973. Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder was commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre in 1968 and published in Scripts (1971) and Spontaneous Combustion (1972). Productions were in London August 1969 and in 1970 by La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York City. Boats was commissioned for “An Omnibus of Short Works,” and performed in Los Angeles on 12 October 1969. Other commissioned plays include Black Children's Day (Brown University, 1980); A Lancashire Lad (Empire State Youth Theater Institute, 1980), based on the childhood of Charles Chaplin; and Orestes and Electra (the Juilliard School, 1980), adaptations from the Euripides plays. Orestes and Electra are published in Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (1988). Kennedy mentions an additional commissioned play, The Life of Robert Johnson, on page three of her 1987 memoir. In 1996, she published Sleep Deprivation Chamber: A Theatre Piece with Adam P. Kennedy.

Over the years, Kennedy has spent a good amount of time in classroom settings. She has taught and/or lectured at Yale (1972–1974), Princeton (1977), Brown University (1979–1980), University of California, Berkeley (1986), and Harvard (1990–1991). She published “Letter to My Students” in Kenyon Review in 1993.

Bibliography

Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, eds. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, 1987.
Adrienne Kennedy, interview by Elin Diamond, Studies in American Drama 1945–Present, eds. Philip C. Kolin et al., 1989, pp. 143–157.
Jane Schlueter, “No Place but the Funnyhouse: The Struggle for Identity in Three Adrienne Kennedy Plays,” in Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, ed. Susan E. Meigs, 1990, pp. 172–183.
Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy, eds. Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, 1992.
Linda Kintz, The Subject's Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama, 1992.
Obododimma Oha, “Her Dissonant Selves: The Semiotics of Plurality and Bisexuality in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro,” American Drama 6:2 (Spring 1997): 67–80.
Carla J. McDonough, “God and Owls: The Sacred and the Profane in Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers,” Modern Drama 40:3 (Fall 1997): 385–402 (there are other articles on Kennedy in this issue)

Lovalerie King